Julien wrote:
>
> Mark, what you said is fine and I've no issue with it
> except for one thing. The
> trouble is that I don't understand how it answers my post.
> Not that I want to force
> you to answer me, but it looked as if it was an answer
> before I read your post.
You are right: you raised specific issues about the mechanisms of
dollar hegemony. I thought it was a good post and we need more of the
same.
>
> Anyway, as to the one thing which bothers me. Why do we
> bash ourselves?
> Henwood is on our side, is he not?
On Doug Henwood, I bother because people on the left take him more
seriously (suspend more disbelief) than they do other leftwing totems
(e.g. Nader). I don't like self-serving populist demagoguery. Doug
writes 100's of emails all over the place, and says what his audience
is supposed to want to hear. On one and the same day he can be found
siding with the angels and demanding more criticism of the World Bank,
even that it should be closed forthwith etc; and then in almost the
same breath urging us to agree that there is a sunny side to the
system after all: "What's so hard about saying the system sucks, yeah,
but it sucks less for a lot of people than it did a few years ago."
This, of course, refers only to workers lucky enough to be exploited
in the USA. But it's theoretically unhinged to argue for closing the
World Bank in one place while applauding one of the most immediate
results of World Bank/IMF etc efforts in another, i.e. the enriching
of the USA (an ethnoterritorial political entity which combines many
classes and ethnic groups under the leadership and domination of US
finance capital; whose chief cultural discourse + means of
incorporation of the masses under its tutelage is precisely tabloidism
of the kind: "What's so hard about saying the system sucks, yeah, but
it sucks less for a lot of people than it did a few years ago."
Especially when uttered by panjandrums of the New York left,
celebrants of alternatives cultures/lifestyles, pomo politics, and
'orthodox' Marx-bashing folks like Doug Henwood. If you get my drift.
Actually, there is more militancy about for eg ecological issues, in
Mr Gore than there is in Mr Henwood. And they sound similar. Gore
talks a lot about 'working American families'. It's the same verbiage,
and it's a cruel hoax at the expense of those same Americans.).
Yes, I have taken it on myself to document some of his
inconsistencies, and to point out why they exist in the first place.
Doug's main theme is the Panglossian one that things ain't so bad
after all, and they could be worse. According to this theory, those of
us who believe they *will* get worse are sour fellows full of twisted
hate and misanthropy. That, undoubtedly, would have been Douglasovich
Henwoodov's approach to the politics of say Vladimir Lenin (that
sectarian loser) in 1913, if Henwoodov had then existed as a kind of
Tsarist stooge in the Russian Duma, spouting fashionable idiocy about
free love one minute while denouncing as gloomy catastrophists the
next, anyone who humbly suggested that the whole Edwardian thing was
about to go bang any minute now.
If he fails on the oil
> issue, it's good practice
> to criticize him of course. But can you fairly say that he
> celebrates the current
> order? The things he's talking about are not necessarily
> related to the plunder
> of anyone. I'm not telling you that they aren't. I don't
> know. But you can explain
> them otherwise without beign a rocket scientist. These
> things seem to be more
> recent than the plunder, isn't it?
If by 'these things' you mean the so-called 'New Economy', the
definitive answer is, no, they are the direct product of plunder at
home and abroad by US finance and industrial monopoly capital. Other
than that, there *is* no New Economy. There is an Old Economy which
(just like the Pax Britannica 150 years ago) visits
socially-devastating deflations on the rest of the world by sucking
all its dependent social formations, colonoies, satrapies etc, dry,
and then glorying in its own alleged 'scientific' and 'technical'
achievements. Of course, if you get Mr Henwood in a corner, he will be
the first to say the New Economy doesn't exist, why he's just written
a book called 'A New Economy?' which probably says as much. This is
called having your cake and eating it.
This is the CrashList which exists on the premise that social,
economic and ecological processes and phenomena are interlinked and
that powerful positive feedback effects exist which cause
disequilibria and stepchanges. Non-linear change is a fundamental
concept in all modern sciences except economics and psychotherapy,
evidently. But these are both professions which depend upon finding
gullible clients with deep pockets who want to eb told lies about
themselves.
More on the dollar later (but all mention of Peter Mathias gives me a
queasy feeling].
Mark
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